A blog about dining, cooking, and eating in and around Orange County, California.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

King's Hawaiian Bakery & Restaurant - Torrance

Ah Hawaii! On days where I need to be lulled into a tropical vacation mood, I'll put on some slack-key guitar music so I can revert to a trance-like state, my mind going back to memories of time spent eating sweet Hawaiian bread flavored with lillikoi at Punalu'u Bakery, egg breakfasts with Portuguese sausage and sticky rice at random mom n' pops we found on the way to the beach, and poke, lots and lots of poke.

This is why I wish King's Hawaiian is closer to me than Torrance. The sweet rolls it produces, the one everyone and their mother uses for sliders, you already know about: it's everywhere. But actually eating there, at the restaurant, is another thing entirely. It is one of the closest things I've found in California to eating in the Big Island.

King's Hawaiian is a diner, pure and simple, but the cheerful plucks of the ukelele soundtrack, the aquarium, the palm frond motifs, the yellow and green paint scheme, makes it more than a diner--it's the next best alternative when you don't have a Star Trek holodeck.

Instead of hash browns next to your eggs, they serve domes of rice, plunked down from an ice cream scoop. Instead of bacon, the preferred breakfast meat is Spam and Portuguese sausage, beveled coins seared on the griddle and the kind of thing you actually need rice to eat.

And oh, their French toasts. It's made from the same sugary dough they use for those rolls, ten times as sweet as a brioche that it's practically dessert, especially if you drizzle on the coconut syrup.